The Analysis of Coordination in an Information System Application - Emergency Medical Services

There is an inevitable need for collaboration and coordination among response organizations during the occurrences of emergencies. We attack the coordination problem by analyzing intelligent agents' organizational behaviours and exploring a set of coordination mechanisms. This paper studies the application of our coordination research to a small-scale Emergency Medical Services (EMS) information system with response agencies modeled as organizations of autonomous agents. Due to the excessive amount of information and the dynamic change in the environment, the information decision process has become the backbone of EMS. The significance of our extended set of GPGP coordination mechanisms is examined under various environmental settings in this application domain. This paper models the coordination among three organizations during emergency responses to a set of small scale, concurrent incidents, like ambulance calls, police calls and mixed calls with potential needs of transporting the emergency victims to appropriate medical facilities. An EMS agent framework is implemented, an integrated coordination algorithm is introduced, early experimental results are presented and finally appropriate decisions are suggested for the response organizations. This paper also briefly discusses the extension for the management of emergency incidents to larger scale disasters.

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